What constitutes Misogyny?

[Nordic]

It's creepy. And it's bogus. 100% phony. I mean, right off the bat there's this:

destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present

No. That' doesn't fly! You can't apologize for your unconscious. That's like, say, I got drunk, beat you up and raped your wife, but I can't remember it the next day. "Gosh, I'm sorry, and Id like to apologize for my unconscious actions. Friends?"

What a fucking cop out. You either take responsibility or you don't!

These guys are creepy, with a predatory look to them, like they're trying to say just the right words that will get them back into your pants.

Yuck.

[Canadian_watcher]

I just think that the 'absolutely capitulate to your rightness' part was over the top, and dampened the power of the rest of her words.

Maybe. I hear a light, self-deprecating irony in there, but Web writing and especially reading is notorious for stripping nuance. At any rate, unless there are now headlines everywhere blaring that she apologized without quoting her, or unless everyone reads only the first words and then skips off to yell elsewhere that she's "capitulated," you have to assume most people who even go to the piece will actually read it. I don't know if "it's worse than no apology at all," since it gives a chance to reinforce her point on the Web, and otherwise it would be the others' Web accusations versus a quote from a book (Web usually beats book for reaching people).

I have to agree with all of that.. in the grand scheme somewhat of a non-starter, anyway. I capitulate to your rightness.

[wallflower]

Canadian_Watcher wrote:

I wish she would have stood by what she said the first time. She didn't say ALL, she said most. And unless someone wants to present an academic study of every piece of rap/hip-hop music that proves otherwise, she should have told people who were criticizing her to get lost.

I think that Ashley Judd's amplification was really useful.

One of the problems I have with the Conscious Men Manifesto is the notion of individual men apologizing for "their" gender. Contrary to Stephen Morgan's opposition to the notion of collective responsibility, it seems pretty important to me. I'm just not sure the shape collective repair should take. One way of thinking is an apology writ large. But it seems to me that the foundation of apology is the very particular context of the offense. Part of an effective apology is the promise not to offend in the same way again. It seems that a good deal of what makes apology real is that it's a repair of a small tear in the fabric. In contrast global war, genocide, racism and misogyny are rents tearing the whole apart. The whole is made up of the parts, but the whole is greater than the parts. Clearly it is necessary for individuals to mend and repair the holes and tears in the relationships near to us. The difference that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts is what makes me think that collective responsibility is not quite the same as the repair and maintenance of our local relationships.

Judd made an important point:

"I believe that the social construction of gender - the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women - is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world."

She's not apologizing for that at all. What she's apologizing for is using her words to say that "most rap and hip hop...is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny." Misogyny is larger than the sub set of aficionados of some rap and hip hop. Judd is really smart to see how that phrasing rather conveniently distances mountain music and blue grass from the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny. Judd makes it clear that misogyny is big and not the sort of problem caused by *those people*. I love how she embraces her experience of discrimination against Appalachian folks for empathy and understanding for despised people everywhere.

Judd stands firmly against hatred and her listening to the ways that her original words hurt is pretty instructive. First she notes that the history of discrimination affects her feelings. Believing firmly in human dignity, she's able to empathize with the feelings of others whose history is one of discrimination. Feelings matter those feelings are essential for empathy. But misogyny is a big political issue and ones feelings don't provide an asterisks around certain media which promote it. She maintains that hate and violence against girls and women is something for all of us to stop. And she concludes that she'll keep loving against hate.

I'm sure I'm not capable of articulating the reasons why, but I do believe that love is the answer. This whole thread has opened up so many trains of thought for me. I've had to look at not just at the notion of misogyny but hatred as well. I'm not at all sure that hatred is the opposite of loving; the idea of placing the two on opposite ends of a continuum certainly doesn't appear to me to yield any good information about the middle values.

Last night I was reading about Satan and the history of Satan. W. Scott Poole has a book called Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Poole makes some important connections between American ideas of Satan and misogyny. In reviewing the book religious scholar John Shaplin writes:

An America drunk on notions of its own innocence and goodness has easily identified the devil with its enemies and its enemies with the devil time and time again. At one time or another in American history, the most influential religious movements, the most powerful politicians, and the dominant trends in popular culture have identified marginalized women, native peoples, slaves, Roman Catholics, Muslims, social progressives, alienated young adults, immigrants and numerous other social and political groupings and identities as satanic, inspired by Satan, or even Satan himself.

It seems an obvious point in hindsight, but taking a big picture view of American history Shaplin points out how Poole's work on the history of Satan in America shows that the real service hatred projected at Satan provides is the ability to maintain a naive innocence.

The Conscious Men thing is makes an apology by a gender. Gender seems an abstract place holder functioning disturbingly like Poole's point about how Satan in America has functioned. I'm sure the intent of the Conscious Men Manifesto is good, but I'm troubled by the thought the manifesto serves to obscure more than it reveals. I'm concerned that the manifesto encourages a naive innocence when responsibility is the more appropriate response.

Look how different Ashley Judd's declaration to keep loving is. She says she's not so stupid she can't see history, nor so stupid to think that history makes no difference. She doesn't apologize in the guise of innocence; in fact she makes plain there's no use in being stupid--"Please, people. Seriously...") She opposes hatred of women and girls "with spiritual and non-violent principles every day." That's her love in action. She also proposes the broader political or moral imperative: "Abuse and violence in any form, at any time, in any expression, are never okay." Loving is for Judd the courage to oppose non-violently violence and assaults against girls and women. Loving is rooted in listening and understanding from personal empathy. Loving is believing in a common good.

[Stephen Morgan]

No love, no peace
K-now love, k-now peace
Where there is no love, there will be no peace
But get to know love and you’ll know peace
-- Song for Europe, Half Man Half Biscuit

[Stephen Morgan]

My observation is that this is actually a definition problem because in English we use the same word "guilt" for both individual and corporate guilt ... they are similar, but definitely not the same. I agree with your statement as it pertains to the first, but not to the second.

There's no such thing as corporate guilt, guilt attaches to people. I could maybe see some corporate guilt in a criminal gang, but the guilt derives from the choice to join a criminal gang, a choice made by the individual. No guilt can possibly accrue through having been born into a given group.

[Canadian_watcher]

Canadian_Watcher wrote:

I wish she would have stood by what she said the first time. She didn't say ALL, she said most. And unless someone wants to present an academic study of every piece of rap/hip-hop music that proves otherwise, she should have told people who were criticizing her to get lost.

I think that Ashley Judd's amplification was really useful.

I already capitulated to the rightness of this. I agree that she made some important points and I'm very glad that she did. I feel she articulated them well, too. Still, it's a shame that she was forced into a position of explaining the same thing over again to placate some 'offended' egos. We all knew what she meant, but instead of addressing what she meant, people pick on the inexactitude of her word choices. I mean.. it's a large part of the problem. it's happened here a zillion times.

I'm concerned that the manifesto encourages a naive innocence when responsibility is the more appropriate response.

And I'm concerned that 'ordinary fellas' will look at it and immediately recoil in horror for fear of being associated with a stereotype ... I'm not convinced it is sincere at all. If it is.. well.. they really need a new PR guy. A woman, actually - and a tough one.

[Sounder]

Great article, it takes off on Beck's having said that the clients of Planned Parenthood were all hookers.

But this from the comments, is being posted because it illustrates well a ploy to intimidate ‘good women’ to accept their status as defined by the hee-haw cheerleader of the dominator cult, (switch to newspeak voice now) because social programs must be zeroed out so that we can defeat the terrorist threat.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011 ... ck-hookers

DaveL What if they were? April 12, 2011 - 6:18pm
You know what makes my stomach turn? Beck's unspoken assumption that hookers shouldn't have access to contraception, STD screening, and other reproductive healthcare. It kind of gives you insight into how it is so many women can be anti-choice: it's like

"I see that you are a member of group X. Now, as you may know, there are good Xs and there are bad Xs. The bad Xs deserve to be raped and beaten and left to die in the gutter. All the good Xs agree this is so... you are one of the good Xs, right?"

[Searcher08]

You either treat people as individuals or you don't. If you hold people responsible for the actions of others because of the group they were born into, you don't, even if those "people" include yourself. Those are just elemental human values.

I agree with Morgan!

Infinite Improbability Drive

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast intersteller distances in a mere nothingth of a second without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.

It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's research team on Damogran.

This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molicules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually imposssible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particulary unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:

If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one, is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea ... and turn it on!

He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generater out of thin air.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynced by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.

[Canadian_watcher]

ha ha ha!
since I am here first, I'd like to claim that I am represented by the bunny, the moose, the baboon, and the otter.
edit: Stephen is most definitely the Bambleweeny, tho.

[wallflower]

Canadian_Watcher:

I already capitulated to the rightness of this. I agree that she made some important points and I'm very glad that she did. I feel she articulated them well, too. Still, it's a shame that she was forced into a position of explaining the same thing over again to placate some 'offended' egos. We all knew what she meant, but instead of addressing what she meant, people pick on the inexactitude of her word choices. I mean.. it's a large part of the problem. it's happened here a zillion times.

Sorry to make a point at your expense. I agree with you about how too often arguments turn on over-enthusiastic parsing of words. In this case a paragraph stands in for a whole book.

I still like how she handled it, especially that she didn't flinch from the implicit criticism about her white privilege, bur rather in turn point out that her point is that hatred of girls and women is at the root of the dominator system which privileges some at the expense of many.

There's a piece from The Nation in re a child's rape, Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow that I had thought to weave into my post, but the post was too rambling as it was. A snippet:

Beyond the horror of the organized murder of black citizens, students were most troubled by the recreational nature of it all: the images of smiling white citizens, fathers and sons, upstanding Christians gathered in fellowship around the smoldering ruin of a black body—all preserved on postcards.

If you asked any of these people in the abstract if it is right to hang a person, set him on fire and then riddle the body with bullets, they would likely have called those actions illegal and sinful. But there is an asterisk: unless that person was black; unless he had demanded his wages, or been to slow to vacate a sidewalk when a white person walked by, or been “unpopular” (these are all actual reasons cited for lynching). These are actions of people who have been given a moral escape clause, an asterisk in which upstanding Christians can sate the demonic appetites of their collective id. Thus an act of abomination becomes a moment worthy of commemorating with a photograph.

I thought about that discussion of lynching again as news spread that the alleged perpetrators were so utterly secure in the righteousness of their act that some of them snapped pictures or recorded footage on their cell phones. We have, in 2011, reached a point when the public display of charred human remains is no longer acceptable. But the response of some of the citizens of Cleveland, Texas, to this horrific assault has brought us face to face with a kind of gender Jim Crow. Here the asterisk is not failure to conform to racial etiquette but the lax adherence to an equally stringent gender code, one where “innocent” is a relative concept and rape, like lynching, can be elevated nearly to the level of civic responsibility

That's where I got the "asterisks" I stuck in my earlier post. This essay has had me thinking since I read it a couple weeks ago.

When I see "child rape" in the newspaper, or even "rape" I'm afraid I turn the page too quickly. Violence against children affects me viscerally, and the truth is I'd rather not be sickened. Really there's so much bad news I suspect most of us feel the need to limit or modulate our exposure to news. Butt it troubles me that I rather systematically turn my head away from news about violence against girls and women. It's bad enough I don't want to worry my pretty little head, but worse that I confuse my ignorance with innocence.

So Judd's saying that she opposes hatred against women and girls using spiritual and non-violent methods everyday, made the point that it's not enough to know, but we have to resist. And the finger points my direction long enough for me to realize that I too often try not to know, much less resist.

The Nation article points out how victim blaming perpetuates a cycle of abuse. In Texas some are saying their should be an asterisk: "the girl is fast." or an asterisk: Black people have been discriminated against in these parts for a long time.

Judd wanted to qualify that her criticism was of rap and hip hop that normalize a rape culture; it was not a blanket criticizes of the genres. She pointed out that country and bluegrass music mean a lot to her because those forms provided a means to resist discrimination and to forge positive identities among people, her people. Rap and hip hop have done the same, so not only does she understand some of the criticism she received she feels it. I liked that part, and especially liked that having said that she then points out that a history of discrimination doesn't rate an asterisk. Violence against girls and women is wrong every time. History matters, but doesn't give a free pass.

I've got work to do. First to pay more attention, second to resist hatred. There's another bit Judd which isn't separate from the other two, but includes it and that is loving more.

[Stephen Morgan]

ha ha ha!
since I am here first, I'd like to claim that I am represented by the bunny, the moose, the baboon, and the otter.
edit: Stephen is most definitely the Bambleweeny, tho.

So I get to be a cat and, nature's most fearsome beast, the badger. Sounds good to me. The internet is made of tubes and those tubes are full of me.

[Canadian_watcher]

ha ha ha!
since I am here first, I'd like to claim that I am represented by the bunny, the moose, the baboon, and the otter.
edit: Stephen is most definitely the Bambleweeny, tho.

So I get to be a cat and, nature's most fearsome beast, the badger. Sounds good to me. The internet is made of tubes and those tubes are full of me.

badgers are cool (especially the badass honey badger, have you seen that video? it's in the cuteness only thread..) but otters are so playful I couldn't resist!
I shouldn't have even commented again on this silliness but my inner otter is too strong...

[Peregrine]

I'm never buying you a pint again, Steve... Well, its unanimous, the blokes in that vid are creepy (I liked mister dread locks) & didn't look at the source of the vid. It apparently has cult roots? ... I was just super excited that there might have been somewhat of an understanding of what women tend to go through on a regular basis. And yeah, me being the froofy spiritualy minded tantric sorta lovin' person I am, I kinda liked it. I think it was mentioned in the Saloon it was a "fuck me" tactic, too? Takes a lot more that tantric smooth talkin' with me, that was the last thing on my mind... Whatever.
Stephen:

I just wanted to assess people's reaction, as they won't let this thread die.

Yeah, I sorta resurrected the thread a little, because I wanted to give you a blaring example of pay inequality I experienced personally specifically because of my gender. Seems you might not be comfortable with it shrinking into the back pages of GD? You want it to die? Oh well. Rock on...

[Stephen Morgan]

I'm never buying you a pint again, Steve...

I'm teetotal.

What is strong drink? Let me think-- I answer 'tis a thing
From whence the majority of evils spring,
And causes many a fireside with boisterous talk to ring,
And leaves behind it a deadly sting.

Some people do say it is good when taken in moderation,
But, when taken to excess, it leads to tribulation,
Also to starvation and loss of reputation,
Likewise your eternal soul's damnation.

The drunkard, he says he can't give it up,
For I must confess temptation's in the cup;
But he wishes to God it was banished from the land,
While he holds the cup in his trembling hand.

And he exclaims in the agony of his soul --
Oh, God, I cannot myself control
From this most accurs'd cup!
Oh, help me, God, to give it up!

Strong drink to the body can do no good;
It defiles the blood, likewise the food,
And causes the drunkard with pain to groan,
Because it extracts the marrow from the bone:

And hastens him on to a premature grave,
Because to the cup he is bound a slave;
For the temptation is hard to thole,
And by it he will lose his immortal soul.

The more's the pity, I must say,
That so many men and women are by it led astray,
And decoyed from the paths of virtue and led on to vice
By drinking too much alcohol and acting unwise.

Good people all, of every degree,
I pray, ye all be warned by me:
I advise ye all to pause and think,
And never more to taste strong drink.

Well, its unanimous, the blokes in that vid are creepy (I liked mister dread locks) & didn't look at the source of the vid. It apparently has cult roots? ... I was just super excited that there might have been somewhat of an understanding of what women tend to go through on a regular basis.

But they don't really mention anything about women. It's all "me this, I that, we the other".

And yeah, me being the froofy spiritualy minded tantric sorta lovin' person I am, I kinda liked it. I think it was mentioned in the Saloon it was a "fuck me" tactic, too? Takes a lot more that tantric smooth talkin' with me, that was the last thing on my mind... Whatever.

It's like direct marketing, it doesn't have to work on many people, as long as it works on one or two it's profitable.

Stephen:

I just wanted to assess people's reaction, as they won't let this thread die.

Yeah, I sorta resurrected the thread a little, because I wanted to give you a blaring example of pay inequality I experienced personally specifically because of my gender.

Don't let me stop you.

Seems you might not be comfortable with it shrinking into the back pages of GD? You want it to die? Oh well. Rock on...

No comprende.

[JackRiddler]